Warren joins outcry for NSA accountability

The escalating spying affair dogging the Obama administration now includes a bipartisan request for accountability from more than a fourth of U.S. senators, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Massive U.S. government spying on citizens was first revealed on June 6 by the British newspaper the Manchester Guardian and the Washington Post. Both had interviewed a former intelligence agent, Edward Snowden, who provided them classified information.

The senators said the administration should have provided them the information about the massive spying operations.

They said it is regrettable the information was revealed by a government whistleblower instead of the Obama administration.

In a letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the senators say it is time for the White House to come clean. They want him to provide straight answers to fundamental questions about the gigantic, clandestine and problematic government data collections that include huge stockpiles of information on ordinary Americans’ telephone use.

The senators say the federal government does not have authority to collect the telephone records, that the practice has wrongly turned Americans’ cell phones into tracking devices, and that the Obama administration misstated the legality of the cell phone tracking.

“We are concerned that officials have told the press that the collection of this location data is currently authorized,” the senators said in the letter that is dated June 27. “In our view, the bulk collection and aggregation of Americans’ phone records has a significant impact on Americans’ privacy that exceeds the issues considered by the Supreme Court.”

Ms. Warren is among the signers and said, “The government has expansive surveillance authority under the Patriot Act, and I believe the public needs a better understanding of how this authority is used in order to engage in an informed national security and civil liberty discussion,” in a statement to the Telegram & Gazette on Monday.

“This letter is a way for Congress to push that important conversation forward, and I look forward to reviewing Director Clapper’s response,” she continued.

The senators want to know whether the national security agency, the “NSA collected or made any plans to collect Americans’ cell-site location data in bulk,” according to their letter.

They said it is wrong for the president and those he supervises to create “secret interpretations” of the Patriot Act.

The dubious practice has “the effect of misleading the public about how the law was being interpreted and implemented. This . . . will unfortunately undermine trust in government,” they wrote.

The 26 senators said that unlike what is supposed to happen, the PATRIOT Act statute “relied for years on a secret body of laws.”

The letter includes the signatures of 40 percent of Senate Democrats — 21of

53 — and 9 percent of Republicans — four of 45. An Independent also signed, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

“Earlier this month, the Executive Branch acknowledged for the first time that the ‘business records’ provision of the Patriot Act has been secretly reinterpreted to allow the government to collect the private records of large numbers of ordinary Americans,” the 26 senators wrote.